Strathclyde Police website pulled offline, possible hack probed

A bad case of robint-hitus?

Strathclyde Police's website has been out of action for nearly 24 hours while its IT team investigate whether the force's online portal has been compromised by Chinese hackers.

A spokeswoman at Strathclyde told The Register that the site had been taken down as a "precaution" to find out what had gone wrong.

She was unable to confirm when the site would resume normal service, or provide specifics about the cause because an "investigation is currently underway."

Reg reader Grant, who was first to inform Strathclyde Police about the possible compromise, told El Reg that: "The hack placed XSS javascript tags onto the homepage of their site and a number of other pages. The domain of the script tag was registered to an individual in China."

According to the Scottish Herald, which first reported that the force's website was having a little lie-down, the cop shop's IT team are assessing the threat, which was picked up after several weblinks appeared that redirected web surfers to a Chinese site known for dishing out viruses.

The paper reports that there was an "anomaly" detected but that IT wonks at the force had already dismissed the possibility of a virus being the cause.

People accessing the site via Internet Explorer were quietly pointed at robint.us, which is a web address based in China. It's unclear at this stage if hackers inserted malicious code on to the homepage of the Strathclyde Police site.

The Strathclyde Police spokeswoman told us that none of their other systems had been affected, and that no users of the site had put their computers at risk.